Will utilities give consumers cash for buying efficient PCs?

SAN FRANCISCO--CORRECTION: Right now, if you buy an energy-efficient dishwasher, utilities like PG&E will give you a cash rebate.

They may do the same for energy-efficient PCs.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a consortium of tech companies that is trying to get the industry and consumers to adopt energy-efficient components, has started to explore the idea of direct rebates with utilities, said Erik Teetzel, a program manager at Google during a meeting at the Intel Developer Forum taking place in San Francisco. Google and Intel are the driving forces behind Climate Savers. (correction: we spelled his name wrong. He wrote it on a business card.)

Some component makers already qualify for rebates from utilities. The payments, though, go directly to these manufacturers. Consumers might enjoy lower retail prices as a result, but it's not the same as getting a check in the mail.

Climate savers earlier this year touted a supposedly more efficient power supply that it is promoting to PC and server makers. Its next initiative will be to persuade IT managers and consumers to adopt the power saving settings on their computers.

[lingsun]

Want to save money? Turn it off at night.

I hate the stupid power saving settings that put the computer in sleep mode in Windows XP. It often doesn't "wake up" properly and has to be rebooted.

[Renegade Knight]

That's a Windows Problem

Your computer could and should be able to conserve power simply.

If the settings in windoze worked right, you would save power all day, especially when it's idle, then when you turn it off at night, save more power still.

[lingsun]

What we really need is more electric power generation.

We don't need to conserve. We need more electrical power plants to generate more electricity.

[ittesi259]

Yes, but you miss the point.

Yes we do need more power plants to generate electricity, I don't think many would dispute that. But at the same time we also need to learn as a society to stop being so damn wasteful. The average consumer should learn some basics of computer power management....such as sleep or hibernation modes, etc. if they don't want to turn off the computer or even the monitor. And since we talk so much about efficient computing, those power supplies are notoriously inefficient and that technology needs a major overhaul. I think (I'll admit Ido not know) that current power supplies are maybe 40-50 percent efficient? Up that to 75 percent, swipe out the supplies in a whole data center and wow, what could potentially happen, their costs go down in server power usage and potentially cooling as well.

Don't look for many plants to just go up overnight. In California the major utilities are barred by regulators to build new plants, and the independant generators can't or won't do it because they can't get investor support.